Weekly adamisacson.com - Issue #18

In a week that saw impeachment smothered and Brexit finalized, I didn’t work on either of those things. So you don’t have to read yet more about them here. Maybe just stick with The Onion:

Report: Fighting Rising Tide Of Authoritarianism Sounds Like A Lot Of Work

“After extensive analysis, we can state with a high degree of certainty that meaningfully resisting the erosion of equality and personal freedoms would probably be super exhausting,” said lead researcher Jeremy Dwyer, warning that stemming the flow of autocratic rule would require a sustained campaign of political pressure over a long period of time that would likely make Americans tired just to think about.

As an added bonus, I won't mention the Super Bowl, either.

Southern Command testified in the Senate

I sat in on the Senate Armed Services Committee's hearing Thursday morning, at which the commander of U.S. Southern Command gave testimony on threats in the region. (That annual "Posture Statement" is here.) Though I've been around the block a few times, I'm too young to have worked in Washington during the Cold War. Back then, though, I imagine these testimonies focused on great-power threats like the Russians and the Chinese. By the 90s, they were mostly about drugs. In the 00s, they were about terrorism. In the 10s, it was mostly "transnational organized crime." The last couple of "posture" documents, though, have taken us right back to the Russians and the Chinese (with some Iran thrown in). Full circle.

Senators asked Adm. Craig Faller about China, Southcom's budget, drug interdiction, the role of women in peace and security, relationship-building with the region's militaries, human trafficking, Venezuela and its relationship with Russia, Guantanamo, and the impact of climate change. They did not ask about the state of democracy in the region, corruption and weak institutions, civil-military relations, or poverty and inequality.

I'll be part of a group of human rights NGOs meeting with Adm. Faller later this week. I hope to talk about some of the recent missteps Colombia's military has taken, and concerns about civil-military relations region-wide, as I summarized last December.

Podcast from the border

While in El Paso on January 23, I recorded a podcast with WOLA’s new director for digital strategy, Lizette Alvarez. (The first time I’ve been the interviewee instead of the interviewer on WOLA's podcast.)

I talk about what we’d been seeing and hearing in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. El Paso is on Mountain Standard Time, and it was 6:30am in my hotel room, so you can almost hear the coffee start kicking in as the interview proceeds.

We'll be posting at least one new podcast this coming week, maybe more. So if you're not subscribed to the WOLA Podcast, just search for "WOLA Podcast" in your player of choice. (Or the raw feed is here.)

A digital renovation project gets underway

I made good progress last week on a fundamental renovation of our colombiapeace.org website. I’ll be doing a lot more over the next two months, when I'll be keeping my travel schedule down to two or three short trips.

The new site will have the following sections:

• A blog, as before. This is all built on WordPress, so it’s super-easy to maintain a blog alongside several standalone (but regularly updated) pages.
• A timeline of key events, with links to source documents and public-domain photos. (We did this between 2012 and 2015, and I’ve always been bummed that we didn’t carve out the time to keep this up to date.) I’ll re-start it as of January 1, 2020. Instead of maintaining it manually as in the past, I’ll build it on a database, so that you’ll be able to click, for example, “Reintegration of Ex-Combatants” and see a timeline for just that topic.
• A series of regularly updated explanatory pages, sort of like the “card stacks” that Vox.com featured when it launched (but later gave up). Basically, about 1,000 words each on topics, which will be updated whenever new data or information arises. Topics may include, but not be limited to, the ELN, Armed Groups Currently Active, Comprehensive Rural Reform, Reintegration of Ex-Combatants, Social Leaders and Human Rights Defenders, Coca Substitution and Eradication, and U.S. Aid to Colombia.
• An archive of WOLA’s reports and commentaries, which would duplicate our main website but perhaps be easier to navigate.
• A page or sidebar of news links, which I can just paste over from my news database.
• A page of external resources, mainly other organizations’ reports, U.S. government information, and UN reports.
• I’m still toying with additional pages like key numbers and statistics, an archive of our charts and infographics, photos (public domain and our own Creative Commons-licensed images), or embedded videos from us and others.

I think this is exciting. Making it is going to mean some long coding jags and some late nights. I hesitate to say how long it will take to finish: I want to say late March, but this has the feel of a project that will blow through my estimates. At least I’ll be able to add these new features to the “old” site even before the redesign is complete.

Other Colombia work

Less ambitiously, over the weekend I made a "Twitter List" of official accounts (governments, UN, etc.) that have something to do with security and peace in Colombia. One thing you find if you visit this list is a profusion of military tweets, featuring photos of soldiers doing soldier-y things. A big reason is that civilian agencies tend to have one single account, but military units all over Colombia each have their own accounts. There are a lot of photos of soldiers engaging with the general population out in rural areas, including kids whom they'll even dress up in uniforms for selfies.

Also on Colombia, expect a piece early this week about aerial herbicide fumigation in coca-growing zones, a U.S.-backed practice that Colombia banned in 2015 for health reasons. The government of President Iván Duque wants to re-start the program, as does Washington. On December 30, the presidency issued a draft decree laying out how the program would operate. The one-month comment period (for Colombian citizens) on that decree ran out on Thursday. We sent a document to some allies in Colombia who plan to challenge the decree in court, and we'll get it up on WOLA's website shortly.

Politics and the English language and migration

A thought on Twitter about the euphemisms that the U.S. and Mexican governments keep using to talk about migration, and how closely they echo Orwell’s 1946 observations about how authoritarians abuse our language.

5 links from the past week

• Colombia’s Ideas for Peace Foundation think-tank published a useful analysis of the ELN guerrilla group: its increased strength, territorial gains following the FARC’s demobilization, its activity in Venezuela, and its sources of financing. The authors note that it would be very difficult to defeat the ELN militarily, as it is decentralized and has deep roots in the regions where it is active. They recommend against giving up on renewed peace talks.
• InsightCrime posted its annual “Homicide Round-Up,” looking at murder rate data in 2019 from Venezuela (60.3 homicides per 100,000 residents) to Chile (2.6). Honduras saw an increase in murders for the first time since 2017, while El Salvador saw an “unprecedented” drop. Mexico’s rate is now worse than Colombia’s and Guatemala’s.
• A thoroughly reported Wall Street Journal piece depicts an easily distracted Trump administration losing ground to Russia all of last year as it sought to prop up Venezuela’s political opposition and unseat Nicolás Maduro.
• Colombia’s Bajo Cauca region, a couple of hours’ drive north of Medellín, right now is one of the most violent parts of the country. The ELN and FARC dissidents are there, but the most intense violence has been between the Gulf Clan neo-paramilitaries and a regional splinter group called the “Caparrapos.” Medellín’s El Colombiano interviews a Caparrapo commander for the first time. The article does a good job of mapping the zone and questions the government’s security strategy there. It doesn’t mention that the Bajo Cauca, and its coca fields, has been a major target of U.S. assistance in recent years.
• A year ago in December, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal, a Guatemalan migrant who’d been apprehended with her father in New Mexico, died of a bacterial infection while in Border Patrol custody. At Texas Monthly, Anna-Catherine Brigida reports from Caal’s rural Guatemalan hometown, where much of her family remains (her father is in Philadelphia trying to send money home). “When I visited in September, nine months later, Jakelin’s death still hung over the community like a shroud.”

Colombia’s Ideas for Peace Foundation think-tank published a useful analysis of the ELN guerrilla group: its increased strength, territorial gains following the FARC’s demobilization, its activity in Venezuela, and its sources of financing. The authors note that it would be very difficult to defeat the ELN militarily, as it is decentralized and has deep roots in the regions where it is active. They recommend against giving up on renewed peace talks.

• InsightCrime posted its annual “Homicide Round-Up,” looking at murder rate data in 2019 from Venezuela (60.3 homicides per 100,000 residents) to Chile (2.6). Honduras saw an increase in murders for the first time since 2017, while El Salvador saw an “unprecedented” drop. Mexico’s rate is now worse than Colombia’s and Guatemala’s.
• A thoroughly reported Wall Street Journal piece depicts an easily distracted Trump administration losing ground to Russia all of last year as it sought to prop up Venezuela’s political opposition and unseat Nicolás Maduro.
• Colombia’s Bajo Cauca region, a couple of hours’ drive north of Medellín, right now is one of the most violent parts of the country. The ELN and FARC dissidents are there, but the most intense violence has been between the Gulf Clan neo-paramilitaries and a regional splinter group called the “Caparrapos.” Medellín’s El Colombiano interviews a Caparrapo commander for the first time. The article does a good job of mapping the zone and questions the government’s security strategy there. It doesn’t mention that the Bajo Cauca, and its coca fields, has been a major target of U.S. assistance in recent years.
• A year ago in December, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal, a Guatemalan migrant who’d been apprehended with her father in New Mexico, died of a bacterial infection while in Border Patrol custody. At Texas Monthly, Anna-Catherine Brigida reports from Caal’s rural Guatemalan hometown, where much of her family remains (her father is in Philadelphia trying to send money home). “When I visited in September, nine months later, Jakelin’s death still hung over the community like a shroud.”

Music I had on heavy rotation in January

I heard a lot of good music last month. Here's a playlist of 16 songs that stuck most in my headphones, on Spotify, YouTube, and Tidal.